Why I Wrote The Venus Fly Trap
They say memoirs are dangerous things — once you put your truth down on paper, you can never take it back. But for me, not writing The Venus Fly Trap would have been far more dangerous.
For years, I carried around stories that lived under my skin like splinters. The kind of memories you push down, laugh off, or drink away because facing them feels too raw. But here’s the problem with secrets: they don’t stay quiet. They whisper in the back of your mind. They eat away at your sleep. They leak out in your choices, your relationships, your mistakes.
I got to a point where silence was no longer an option.
The Breaking Point
People often ask, “Was there one moment that pushed you to finally write the book?” The truth is, it wasn’t one dramatic lightning strike — it was death by a thousand paper cuts. A relationship that unraveled. Lies that caught up with me. A sense of shame that weighed heavier with each passing year.
I realized I had two choices: keep playing the role I thought the world wanted from me, or strip it all back and tell the truth.
The Venus Fly Trap became that truth.
Why This Story?
I didn’t set out to write a neat morality tale. Life rarely offers neatness. What I wanted was honesty — messy, complicated, hilarious, heartbreaking honesty.
The memoir is about sex and love, yes. But it’s also about the ways we trap ourselves: in relationships, in lies, in the stories we tell to survive. Like the plant itself, the Venus flytrap looks alluring from the outside. Step too close, though, and you find yourself caught in something far harder to escape than you ever imagined.
I wanted readers to see the beauty and the danger in that metaphor, because we’ve all been there. Whether it’s a lover, a job, a belief system, or a dream that turns into a nightmare, the trap is universal.
The Fear Factor
Make no mistake — writing this book terrified me. What will people think? Will they laugh at me? Judge me? Cancel me? These questions circled me like vultures.
But here’s the paradox: the more I feared being exposed, the more I realized exposure was the only way to be free. Shame survives in silence. Once you shine a light on it, shame evaporates like mist.
That’s what writing this memoir became for me: a radical act of exposure, a stripping away of every mask I’d worn for decades.
Truth vs. Fiction
Some early readers told me, “Stephen, this reads like a novel. Surely you exaggerated?” I didn’t. In fact, if anything, I softened some edges.
Life is often stranger, funnier, and more shocking than anything you could make up. By writing it exactly as it happened, I wanted to show that truth doesn’t need embellishment to be gripping.
And if my story feels larger-than-life at times, maybe that’s just because we don’t often admit, publicly, how wild and irrational our private lives really are.
What I Learned in the Writing
Writing The Venus Fly Trap taught me something simple but profound: you cannot outrun yourself. No matter how many continents you cross, relationships you jump into, or stories you spin, the truth will always catch up with you.
The process also showed me the power of vulnerability. We live in a culture obsessed with polish — curated feeds, perfect selfies, highlight reels. Vulnerability cuts through that noise. It creates connection. It says, “I’m human. You’re human. Let’s drop the act for a minute.”
That’s what I wanted the book to feel like: not an author preaching from on high, but a friend leaning across the table, telling you what really happened.
Why Share It With the World?
This is the part that still surprises me. When I started writing, I thought the book was for me — therapy, release, closure. But once I put the manuscript in front of others, I realized it was bigger than that.
Readers told me they saw themselves in my mess. They laughed at the absurdity, winced at the mistakes, and nodded at the truths. That’s when it hit me: the personal becomes universal. My particular chaos could become a mirror for other people’s hidden struggles.
And if one person feels less alone because I told my story, then every vulnerable page was worth it.
A Love Letter to Chaos
At its heart, The Venus Fly Trap is a love letter — not just to the people I loved, lost, or betrayed along the way, but to the beautiful chaos of life itself.
We don’t get neat story arcs in real life. We get jagged edges, contradictions, and hilarious disasters. But buried in all of that is truth, and truth is worth chasing.
Even if it traps you for a while.
The Invitation
So why did I write this book? Because I had to. Because the silence was louder than the shame. Because stories only have power when they’re shared.
If you’ve ever loved the wrong person, lied to protect yourself, laughed at your own bad decisions, or wondered how the hell you got caught in a trap you swore you’d never step into — then this story is also yours.
Final Thought
Writing The Venus Fly Trap was my way of stepping into the light. Reading it, I hope, is yours.
